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Tag Archives: Primitive

Autoboxing is a new feature offered in the Tiger (1.5) release of Java SDK. In short auto boxing is a capability to convert or cast between object wrappers (Integer, Long, etc) and their primitive types.

Previously when placing primitive data into one of the Java Collection Framework object we have to wrap it to an object because the collection cannot work with primitive data. Also when calling a method that requires an instance of object rather than an int or long, we have to convert it too.

But now, starting from version Java 1.5 we have a new feature in the Java Language which automate this process, its call the Autoboxing. When we place an int value into a collection, such as List, it will be converted into an Integer object behind the scene. When we read it back, it will automatically converted to the primitive type. In most way this simplify the way we code, no need to do an explicit object casting.

Here an example how it will look like using the Autoboxing feature:

package org.kodejava.example.basic;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
public class Autoboxing {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Map<String, Integer> map = new HashMap<>();
// Here we put an int into the Map, and it accepted
// as it will be autoboxed or converted into the wrapper
// of this type, in this case the Integer object.
map.put("Age", 25);
// Here we can just get the value from the map, no need
// to cast it from Integer to int.
int age = map.get("Age");
// Here we simply do the math on the primitive type
// and got the result as an Integer.
Integer newAge = age + 10;
}
}

To get the minimum or maximum value of a primitive data types such as byte, short, int, long, float and double we can use the wrapper class provided for each of them, the wrapper classes are Byte, Short, Integer, Long, Float and Double which is located in java.lang package.

There are times when we want to do a data conversion from other primitive data types into string expression, for instance when we want to format the screen output or simply mixing it with other string. Using a various static method String.valueOf() we can get a string value of them.